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A female mallard duck was lying splayed, but not flattened, in traffic on the opposite side of the freeway from me. It didn’t look dead yet. I’m not sure what it was doing in the road in the first place, but I’m guessing it had been hit. To make things worse, there was a mallard drake, almost certainly her mate, heading into traffic to see what the problem was.

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NPR : Homeland Security – Part II
This NPR report covers legislation that passed the Senate to require producers and users of industrial chemicals to reduce the risk that their stockpiles could be leveraged in a terrorist attack.

Since the legislation passed the Senate, private industry has mobilized their lobbying clout, making good use of their investments in congressmen and the president, stimying attempts to turn this legislation into a law.

The only administration official willing to go on record is a sr member of the Homeland Security Department, arguing that imposing regulations on private companies is excessive, not to mention unfair.

Much better, I suppose, to rape civil liberties in the name of the war on terror.

One thing that occurs to me, supply-chain-management vendors might have an interest in such legislation. They could help companies reduce their inventorys of industrial chemicals, which could, in turn, reduce the risk that a terrorist could steal or release those chemicals as part of a terrorist attack.

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But I can’t help thinking about this: While U.S. forces were unable to protect museums in Baghdad (or Mosul, as Salon’s Phillip Robertson reported) from looting crowds destroying millennia-old artifacts, it seemed to have plenty of troops available to protect the Iraqi oil ministry in Baghdad.

I am quite distressed by the looting all around, and saddened by the fate of the museum of antiquities, but I have to wonder about Rosenberg’s perspective.

I mean, which will mean more to the rebuilding of Iraq, oil revenues, or cultural artifacts?

Now that I have asked it, I realize that the answer is complicated. Oil revenues are going to feed and care for Iraqi’s. The museum might bring in tourist revenue, but I imagine that will be small next to the sheer volume of cash their oil brings in.

But on the other hand, the museum and its contents have strong symbolic value. The cultural artifacts are evidence of Iraq’s place as the home of civilization. This could provide a point of pride for Iraqi’s at a time when pride may be an important yet scarce commodity. Its destruction could undercut that pride, and invite further shame, shame that they were unable to even protect their own heritage.

In the end though, the artifacts are only things, the things they represent, only ideas. I don’t mean to devalue ideas, but ideas like freedom and liberty, and the reality of people having enough food to eat are much more meaningful to me than pride in the accomplishments of ones ancestors.

Of course, none of this changes the fact that if we had more troops on the ground, we could have done more to stop the looting. We could have had more troops on the ground. Our leadership decided not to place them before going to war for reasons that aren’t clear.